Historic Places in Portsmouth

Southsea Castle is a sixteenth-century coastal fortification in Portsmouth, built by Henry VIII in 1544 as part of his programme of coastal defence against French and Spanish invasion and serving continuously as a military fortification until the twentieth century. The castle is built on the classic low artillery fort plan developed in Henry's reign, with a central tower surrounded by a low bastioned enclosure designed to mount heavy cannon at sea level. It was from the beach near Southsea Castle that Henry VIII watched his flagship Mary Rose sink in the Solway Firth in 1545. The castle is now a museum interpreting the long military history of the site and the broader coastal defence heritage of Portsmouth Harbour. The adjacent seafront at Southsea provides extensive beach, promenade and leisure facilities, and the nearby Royal Navy's National Museum and the Mary Rose Museum make Portsmouth one of the finest maritime heritage destinations in the world.

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is one of Britain's most extraordinary maritime heritage sites, a working naval dockyard that has been at the centre of Royal Navy history for centuries and now contains a collection of historic ships, museums and exhibitions that brings the story of British sea power to life with remarkable immediacy. The dockyard has been building, maintaining and housing warships since the twelfth century and still operates as an active naval base alongside its heritage function. The centrepiece of the dockyard's historic attractions is HMS Victory, Admiral Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in October 1805, the engagement at which Britain's naval supremacy over the combined French and Spanish fleets was decisively established and Nelson himself was killed by a French sharpshooter. Victory is the world's oldest commissioned warship still afloat, maintained in a form as close as possible to her 1805 appearance, and the experience of walking the gun decks, squeezing through the low-beamed passages and standing at the spot where Nelson fell is genuinely moving. The ship's scale, and the realisation that hundreds of men fought and lived at close quarters within this wooden hull, is difficult to comprehend from the shore. Adjacent to Victory in the dockyard's Number One dry dock lies the Mary Rose, the Tudor warship of King Henry VIII that capsized and sank in the Solent in July 1545, carrying most of her crew to the bottom with her. Rediscovered in 1971 and raised from the seabed in 1982 in one of the most ambitious underwater salvage operations ever conducted, the Mary Rose now occupies a purpose-built museum where the preserved hull and over 20,000 artefacts recovered from the wreck are displayed in extraordinary detail. The collection includes the personal possessions of crew members, weapons, navigational instruments and everyday objects that together compose the most detailed picture of Tudor shipboard life available anywhere in the world. HMS Warrior, the world's first iron-hulled, armoured warship built in 1861, is moored alongside and completes a trio of ships that span nearly four centuries of British naval technology. Museums within the dockyard cover the history of the Royal Navy from its earliest days, the development of submarine warfare, and the story of Portsmouth itself as a naval town. The dockyard is a full day destination and represents extraordinary value for the number and quality of the historic ships and museums included within a single admission.